Should we police or dictate how our employees dress? Should we only allow them to represent our brand if they have a specific body type or sense of style?

What about internet commenters or trolls? Is it ok for them to bombard our employees with abuse?

Foursys is asking these questions after Jayde, one of its sales executives, appeared in a harmless social media post on LinkedIn - celebrating that the firm now had 500 followers on the professional social network.

The response on LinkedIn was ghastly, with many offensive, derogatory and often sexual comments made towards Jayde.

Jayde, however, has stood up to the bullies - making her own brave video response where she details some of the abuse she received:

“For all of those who say that I know nothing about IT security: Shame on you. I know more than 99% of people you’d meet on the street. I can tell you what a denial-of-service attack is, how SQL injection works, and how to your protect against ransomware. To be perfectly clear: Bullying and shaming people because of the way that they look or how they choose to dress is nasty, and I am not just going to take it - and neither should you.”

Hear hear.

I find it extraordinary that some people would make such hurtful and mean remarks… and particularly dumb that so many did so on LinkedIn, which details their real names, jobs and places of employment.

Seriously, the IT security world needs to grow up and stop thinking that women can be treated in such an appalling way.

It’s all very well having a bug bounty program, argues LinkedIn, but how is your organisation going to cope if it is bombarded with hundreds of meaningless and useless reports, that your security team cannot act upon?

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